Pope’s odyssey in Asia and Oceania a story of both peripheries and politics

ROME – As Pope Francis embarks on a grueling four-nation tour of Asia and Oceania that will mark not only the longest but also the must strenuous international voyage for the 87-year-old pontiff, both his passion for the peripheries and his desire to engage global superpowers will be in play.

From Sept. 2-13, Pope Francis will undertake a sweeping 11-day tour that will carry him to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Singapore.

Marking his 45th international trip and his seventh visit to Asia, the trip will be the longest international voyage of his papacy and one of the most distant, with the initial 13-hour flight from Rome to Jakarta stretching some 11,354 kilometers (7,055 miles).

Featuring 16 speeches and five international flights, Francis’s itinerary would be a challenge for anyone, but it will be especially taxing for an octogenarian missing part of one lung, and who has faced several health scares in recent years.

Last year Pope Francis had two hospital stays, one for what he described as a close call with bronchitis and the other for a surgery to repair an abdominal hernia. He was also forced to cancel a planned trip to Dubai for the COP28 United Nations climate summit due to a serious respiratory infection.

Despite concern over the pontiff’s health, he has been unwavering in his resolve to maintain his travel schedule, having made several daytrips throughout Italy this year without issue, and he has appeared healthy and energetic in recent audiences.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni told journalists during an Aug. 30 press briefing on the trip that the pope’s usual medical entourage, usually consisting of a doctor and a nurse, will be traveling with him, but that no other special precautions were being taken.

Originally planned for 2020 but postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the pope’s trip to Asia and Oceania is expected to feature several of the pope’s key agenda items, such as poverty, climate change, unity in diversity, and interfaith dialogue, as well as issues of geopolitical interest, such as multilateralism, the call for peace, and the Vatican’s ongoing engagement with China.

Passion for the peripheries

From the beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis has made it a personal priority to shed light on oft-ignored global peripheries, traveling to remote places that have never before welcomed a pope, and which have been scarred by poverty, violence and deep political and social crises.

This affinity for the margins will once again be on display during his Sept. 6-9 visit to Papua New Guinea and his Sept. 9-11 visit to East Timor.

While in Papua New Guinea, where Christianity is the most prominent religion, with roughly 26 percent of the population identifying as Catholic, Francis will meet marginalized populations, holding events with national authorities, local bishops and clergy, street children, and missionaries, who make up a large percentage of the Catholic presence.

In addition to the capital city of Port Moresby, he’ll also visit the remote Diocese of Vanimo, referred to by the local Bishop Francis Meli as “the most remote” diocese in the country, made up largely of bushlands inhabited by remote communities and where infrastructure is lacking and much of the population lives in poverty, and domestic violence against women and girls is a pressing concern.

In East Timor, Pope Francis, the first pontiff to visit the country following its independence from Indonesia in 2002, will encounter a population still scarred by war and avid for dialogue after the decades of conflict that led up to its independence.

Speaking to Crux earlier this year, Cardinal Virgilio do Carmo da Silva of Dili, the only city in East Timor that the pope will visit, said Francis’s presence will be a “blessing” and, while the nation enjoys good relations with Indonesia, it will also be an opportunity to continue advancing the cause of unity and reconciliation with their former rulers.

With ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza showing no signs of abating, and with his frequent appeals for an end to the various conflicts raging throughout Asia, it is likely the pope could deliver a sweeping call for peace and dialogue in East Timor, stressing, as he has in the past, the need for global leaders to come together to identify solutions and for an end to the global arms trade.

As a majority Catholic nation, where roughly 97 percent of the local population is Catholic, the pope’s visit will also provide an opportunity to shed light on the importance of foreign missionaries and the Church’s role in the social development of the country in recent decades.

East Timor will also represent a key, but delicate moment for Pope Francis in the Church’s fight against clerical sexual abuse. The country remains divided over allegations of pedophilia against national hero Carlos Ximenes Belo, a bishop and Nobel laureate who has been sanctioned by the Vatican.

Belo, believed to be residing in Portugal, is a former bishop of Dili who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his efforts in promoting a fair and peaceful solution to the country’s conflict as it fought for its independence.

He stepped down in 2002 at the unusually young age of 54, and in 2022 was publicly accused of the sexual abuse of minors, with the Vatican subsequently saying he had been barred from ministry when allegations arose in 2019.

Belo’s legacy remains a stain on the Church in East Timor, but his efforts for national independence also have earned him an enduring support among many East Timorese, making his case a complex and delicate one that Pope Francis will have to navigate with precision.

Engagement with power-centers

In contrast to the physical and existential peripheries Pope Francis will highlight, his visits to Indonesia and Singapore will also provide an occasion for him to forge stronger ties with regional power centers, especially China.

Pope Francis’s Sept. 3-6 stop in Indonesia is significant due to the sheer size of the country, the world’s fourth largest in terms of inhabitants with a population of 275.5 million, roughly 87 percent of whom are Muslim, while only 10 percent are Christian. Catholics themselves make up only about 3.1 percent of the population.

As the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia offers Francis an opportunity to advance interfaith dialogue and to cement ties with the Islamic world, something that has been a consistent priority throughout his papacy.

Francis’s interreligious meeting at Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque – which sits directly across the street from the Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, and which is connected to the church by an underground tunnel called the “Tunnel of Friendship” – will mark one of the most significant moments of his visit to Indonesia.

With concerns about a rise in extremism in recent years, it is expected that the pope will offer encouragement to local Christians and call for an end to religious fundamentalism in his speeches, as well as in a joint-declaration he is expected to sign with Islamic authorities during the interreligious meeting.

In early August, authorities arrested three suspects with ties to an Islamic extremist group known as Daulah Islamiyah on charges that they were plotting to bomb two Catholic churches in East Java. In May, a Muslim mob in a neighborhood just outside of Jakarta assaulted a group of Catholic students who were praying the rosary in a private home.

Pope Francis’s Sept. 11-13 visit to Singapore is highly anticipated in terms of geopolitical interest, as Singapore is not only consistently ranked among the strongest global economies, with prominent businessmen such as George Yao previously advising the Holy See on matters of finance, but it also enjoys close ties to Beijing.

Roughly 74 percent of Singapore’s population is ethnically Chinese, and though Father Francis Lim, regional superior of Jesuits of Malaysia and Singapore, has said that while most Singaporeans are “a long way from our Chinese roots,” he also said Chinese citizens at times get preferential treatment.

Speaking to journalists during a recent media roundtable on Pope Francis’s visit, Lim said that among foreign workers in Singapore, preference for better jobs is often given to the Chinese.

Despite their ethnic ties, “Singapore does not have much connection with China, so this is going to be a very sensitive issue to bring up, because there’s only a trade relationship between Singapore and China,” Lim said.

Many observers have speculated that Pope Francis while in Singapore will perhaps turn to the city-state as a broker in strengthening Sino-Vatican relations as the Holy See negotiates the third renewal of its agreement with China on episcopal appointments, as well as convincing Chinese authorities to mediate peace in conflicts such as the war in Ukraine.

During Friday’s press conference, Bruni said the pope is not expected to fly over Chinese or Taiwanese airspace during his flights from Rome to Jakarta and from Singapore to Rome, and he is unaware if any bishops or faithful from China will travel to Singapore to participate in papal events.

However, a delegation from Hong Kong is expected to attend the pope’s Mass in Singapore, he said.

Aside from whatever geopolitical issues will underlie the papal visit, observers have said it will also be an opportunity to put a spotlight on a continent known for its cultural, religious and ethnic diversity, and which marks of the fastest-growing Catholic populations in the world.

Speaking to Italian magazine L’Espresso, British Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States, said the papal visit will likely feature pleas on behalf of migrants and appeals to combat climate change, but it will also shed light “on the great cultural and religious diversity of the countries” that will be visited.

“The importance of Asia for the Church is undeniable” given the demographics and its cultural patrimony, he said, saying, “I think that Asia also represents a positive model of dialogue and mutual respect that both the universal Church and the entire world can benefit from.”

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